Nokia has launched a new project called Design by Community that is seeking …

Share this story

Nokia is tapping into the collective wisdom of mobile technology enthusiasts on the Internet as it designs a new smartphone concept device. The handset maker has launched a new project called Design by Community which aims to collect feedback about preferred device characteristics from visitors to the Nokia Conversations blog.

The website has a set of sliders that can be used to select a desired phone configuration within certain parameters. When the user has selected their optimal configuration, they can click a "submit" button to send their choices to Nokia. The company will tabulate the results and use the information to design the new device concept. There will be several rounds during which a separate set of parameters will be put up for voting.

The first round focuses on the input mechanisms and device display. Users can select a preferred screen size, specify what kind of screen they want, and indicate their preferences for the keyboard and physical buttons. The voting system imposes some restrictions on the combination of device characteristics that can be chosen. If the user chooses a configuration that is too radical or not sufficiently ambitious, the system won't let them submit it.

The next round of voting, which will open on March 22, will allow participants to select a preferred size and shape for the concept device. Subsequent rounds will focus on materials, connectivity, and camera features. There will also be a round in which users will vote on whether they favor the Linux-based MeeGo platform or the newly opened Symbian operating system.

Nokia says that it received thousands of votes within the first 24 hours of the project. In a blog entry, the company expressed appreciation for the volume of responses and also explained the reasoning behind some of the limitations that are being imposed on the experiment. For example, Nokia says that it intentionally decided to exclude hardware specifications—such as processor performance and memory quantity—from the voting so that the design wouldn't become dated too quickly by advancements in mobile component technologies.

Based on the responses so far, Nokia says that a majority of the voters want a 16:9 capacitive touchscreen and a physical QWERTY keyboard. The most common choices for screen size are 4.5-inch and 4-inch, indicating that users favor a spacious screen but don't want a monolith.

In light of Nokia's growing affinity for the collaborative open source software development model, it's unsurprising that the company is experimenting with crowdsourced product design. Last year, Nokia polled members of its Maemo community to gain feedback on user preferences for keyboard layout. The new Design by Community project is a much more ambitious polling effort.

Although the responses will give Nokia some instructive insights into what design characteristics and capabilities people want from modern smartphones, it's unclear if a community-driven design process can produce meaningfully usable data or serve as the basis for producing a product that is genuinely desirable.

Successful product development arguably transcends the specifics. In practice, delivering a holistically compelling user experience may be more important than conforming with a checklist of expected features. That said, there is still a lot of practical value in understanding consumer expectations. The challenge for Nokia will be respecting the feedback it gets from its users without becoming slavishly committed to implementing the resulting feature checklist.